Lovecraft's Astronauts.

Yesterday I was listening to Quinn's Ideas Podcast. It's a literary presentation of connections and ideas. I've been a fan of Quinn's work since his channel was originally called "Ideas of Fire and Ice." That title dried up the around when season seven of the Game of Thrones premiered. I can't blame him. The show and the books that Quinn had based his channel on were unsatisfactory or incomplete. The channel was rebranded to Quinn's Ideas and the creator went out seeking other scifi and fantasy books to scratch that itch. And it seems he's found it. Not only has Quinn become a resource for my own ideas, he's exposed me to books like Annihilation, that have opened new doors to me for entertainment and research. I recently dicovered his podcast and listened to Quinn and a friend discuss the connections between Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness," and Ridley's Scott's "Prometheus." Quinn themed the discussion around this concept of "first astronauts." He opens up explaining Lovecraft's...troubled backstory and many, MANY, flaws but doesn't dwell on them. I appreciate that alot. It sickens me when Lovecraft's work is dismissed due to his failings. But I can understand why some people put a hard stop on the man. The podcast goes on to describe the story and the expedition to these mountains and what the pair of researchers discover. It reminded me why I love that story so much. The crew find heiroglyphs from a time that's so old it's been forgotten. These creatures the researchers find, these Elder Things, are possibly the creators of life on the Earth. Their tech is so advanced that it seems as if magic to us which is a hard idea for me to conceptualize. I've always thought that people were intelligent and if you were to bring a smart phone back to the stone age they would likely understand that you were using a communications device. While the specifics would be a mystery to them, just as it is to us, (do YOU know how a phone works?) they wouldn't be ignorant chimps throwing poo at you for being a witch. People are smart, we can figure things out. So this jump from understanding science to blurring the line between technology and magic is a bit difficult to swallow. The history of the Elder Things has been lost to time to the point that the it's been forgotten by us. It's similar to how the majority of ancient life on our planet has been lost. I recall hearing that some paleontologists claim that we barely have ten percent of all the bones of the creatures that lived and died on earth. That leaves plenty for the imagination but little for the true story. I think it would be heartbreaking to try to find an answer you likely have no way to complete. After Quinn noted how old the Elder Thing's history is, I stopped in the middle of work and just pondered that concept. How much truth, and history has been lost to time? Quinn went on to talk about the Elder Thing's war with Cthulhu. A lot of the broader history behind Lovecraft's mythos is told in other stories leaving the reader to piece together the story themselves. This vagueness is what draws in the reader, like myself, and invites them to add their own interpretation rather than let Lovecraft fill in the blanks. Going back to what Quinn was talking about when it came to Lovecraft, I don't think that Quinn is an avid reader of Lovecraft's work. To me, the man seems to be a disturbed individual who is trying to put the pieces of reality together. Lovecraft's story "Call of Cthulhu" draws on this idea with it's opening statement: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inabilityof the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of the black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. In other words, it's good that we can't put all the pieces together or we might go mad from the truth of reality. I think I'll write more once I've listened to more of Quinn's ideas.